Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present

by Ruth Ben-Ghiat

IN HIS 1931 BOOK The Technique of the Coup d’Etat, the Italian-Austrian journalist and writer Curzio Malaparte cautioned that Mussolini, in power for a decade, was “a modern man, cold, audacious, violent and calculating,” and predicted that Hitler, then rising in popularity due to the Depression, would be even worse. The Austrian might look like a waiter and rant like a fool, but Germans had acclaimed him as “an ascetic, a mystic of the cult of action,” just as many Italians had responded to Mussolini. If Hitler got into office, Malaparte warned, he would try to “corrupt, humble, and enslave the German people, in the name of German liberty, glory, and power.”23 Journalists, aides, and others who have witnessed the strongman’s dangerous character firsthand echo Malaparte’s chillingly accurate forecast. Authoritarianism has had vastly divergent outcomes as it evolved over a century. The fascists committed genocide, while twenty-first-century leaders tend to favor targeted assassinations and mass detention. This makes the coherence of the collective portrait that emerges, the traits of one ruler eerily echoing those of others, more striking. Hitler resembled many later leaders in being an indecisive and insecure ruler behind his all-powerful Führer facade, his opinions sometimes reflecting the last person he had spoken to. Mobutu was hardly the only authoritarian to be “obsessively concerned with slights to his Presidency,” as US ambassador to Zaire Brandon Grove asserted. No...